Tag: TRANSLATIONS

Like a sky Inside by Jakuta Alikavazovic

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Like a sky inside by Jakuta Alikavazovic

French fiction/ essay

Original title – Comme un ciel en nous.

Translator Daniel Levin Becker

Source – Personal copy

Is there ever a time when you see little bits about a book and you just know it will be one of those books that will be with you forever? There aren’t many books like that. They come along once in a blue moon, the ones. that touch you. I had an idea that this book might be one of those books. Firstly, it has a writer of Balkan heritage writing in French, and me, they are my two favourite places to read books, so I knew this book from the daughter of Yugoslavian parents born in Paris. Her parents were from Bosnia and Montenegro. She has also worked as a translator on books by David Foster Wallace and Ben Lerner, which means she also has great taste in literature.

The Louvre was the first French city where I felt at home, my father used to say. The official story: he came to Paris in 1971, for the love of my poetess mother. He stayed for the Louvre. He was twenty years old and the twenty years that followed – covering, in part, my childhood – would unfold as though in a dream.

His joie de vivre. His appetite for the world. His opti-mism, and the limits thereof. He had no money and still believed it made no difference, because he had enough to act like he did. To pretend.

Of course, his head must have spun. To imagine the City of Light, to dream of it, is one thing; to discover it, to be a body, a twenty-year-old body wandering its daytime and nighttime streets, is another. All forms of difficulty

– loneliness, poverty, the roundly accepted fact that the slightest cough, the slightest cold, is far graver in a foreign language — all forms of difficulty have disappeared from his official story. Among them, his reasons for emigrat-ing: Paris, certainly. My mother, of course. The Louvre, naturally. But it would take me years to learn that he did it the way he did to escape military service in Yugosla-via, his country of origin, which today no longer exists.

Her parents Home Yugoslavia imploded and split

The book has the premise that she spends an overnight stay in the Louvre Gallery, where her young son is at Over. Over the evening, we see how art, family, memories, and how you could steal the Mona Lisa all drift by. This is a book that is one of those you sink into as a reader. It shows us how art and memories can connect from a piece that remembers her heading to New York against her father’s wishes when she was younger. The satyr she saw has a fellow sculpture now in New York that she had seen on the trip her father didn’t want her to do, as it drifts in her mind. Like the star in the sky, it follows her life’s path and her relationship with her father, alongside her evident love of art and how she connects with art. A night that sees her move far out of the bounds of the walls of the Gallery and the sense of time and place.

When I think about my father, I often think of those strange and beautiful images of wild animals, great and mighty deer, descending upon cities, wandering through streets. What they are experiencing is also an exile -quite solitary, like my father’s, quite majestic.They seem immediately at home, and their presence breathes a new enchantment into what we thought we knew: the sidewalks, the intersections, the asphalt under our feet. Nonetheless, an exile. They come driven by hunger. Or curiosity. Which for some, such as my father, such as me, is more or less the same thing. Yes, there is something deerlike in the familiarity I feel for him; a hint of wildness, of the unknown, forever inaccessible to my words but not to my heart. My heart, of which it is one of the centers. One of the places most intimate to me and, in spite or because of this, one of the most foreign.

I loved this observation of her father

This is a book I read as it was on the Republic of Consciousness longlist. But when I put a picture up and people like Anthony at times flow stemmed said they loved this book, I knew it would be one I would like. I love books that deal with Art, travel, memory and that bond between father and Daughter. It captures how your mind can drift from it, and it is with my dad’s engineering or castles that is our connection. Edinburgh castles or a dam make me think of my father and his past his life. I connected with this work as I said, there are just some books you know before you turn over the first p[ages you hope and think will be with you for the rest of your life. This is one of those books like Panorama by Dusan Sarotar or Fireflies by Luis Sagasti or back even further for me the Encyclopedia of Snow by Sarah Emily Miano. Those books that just touch you in a way you can’t say other than it’s about a connection on an emotional level with the writer at that moment of reading that will last forever after you put the book down. Have you ever had that feeling about a book and that connection that makes you drift into your own life as a reader and son of a daughter, in this case!

 

Spanish Beauty by Esther Garcia Llovet

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Spanish Beauty by Esther Garcia Llovet

Spanish fiction

Original title – Spanish Beauty

Translated – Richard Village

Source – Subscription

I am so pleased Foundry have gone the subscription route as last year the books I read from them were both in my books of the year. So when this the first book of this year fell through my letterbox, I put aside everything else and read it in a couple of sitting . Esther Garcia Llovet qualified in clinical psychology, but she also studied screenwriting and became a documentary scriptwriter. She has cited Bolano as an influence on her writing. Also; the work of Raymond Carver is a Noir Novella, the first of a trilogy. This is set in the least Spanish city of Benidorm and has a world-weary detective that walks the line of the law on both sides. But this detective is a female with a British father in the most British place outside the UK.

Benidorm. Cheap culture. Beach culture. People who speak three languages without ever studying, corner shops, Belgians, watered-down gin and tonics, gays. Second-hand Tom Clancy novels, swollen with damp, crunchy with sand, sand on your pillow, sand in your paella, in your G-string, in the shower, all-day fry-ups, all-day Thai massage, cicadas at night. Piles of sick, pissing against walls, and Tom Jones songs. Melanomas, cystitis, diarrhoea all round. ChlamydiaAnd the sea. Like the desert of the Levant, of the West, of Las Vegas, shadows of skyscrapers on the beach, reaching higher and higher, shadows that go on for miles, stretching over the surface of the lukewarm sea at ten at night whilst families eat fried chicken on the shore, Mediterranean steel Godzillas on the cold dawn sand.

This opening capture some of what I said about eindorm as a place

Michela McKay is maybe the best way to describe her is rather like DI Burnside from The Bill; she is one of those [police officers with a dodgy reputation about her. We see her trawling through Beindorm in a twin quest. At first, she heard that a famous Dunhill lighter that was once owned by Reggie Kray and last time it came about, had been sold to a Russian Mafia figure is in her City. The other hunt is that of her Absent British father. It captures the dark side of a seaside town the seediness that often in the place of pleasure is just below the surface. This is like a modern take of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock in Modern Spain. She sees the gangsters, lowlifes, and ex-pats among those everyday holidaymakers. It is a ride through the darker side of a place of sun, sea and sex.

“I want to have a laugh with the Russians. We have to have a laugh with the Russians, right, because the Russians know all bout laughs. Vodka, polonium-210, and a stray dog in space. Who can top that? They never go brown, so they come here, to Spain, to our bottled flamenco sun, and we can’t get our heads round why. To buy flats, apartment blocks on the beach, the biggest mansion on the whole Costa de la Luz, a villa with acres of land around it, a Mediterranean pine forest and a golf course with a president chucked in.We see them, all these Russians, in the clubs, in cars, in the restaurants in packs of six or seven. The French and the English, sometimes you see a lone one on the loose, but never a Russian. You only ever see lone Russians lurking around the doorways of five-star hotels, neither in nor out, as if they can’t make up their minds, but they know exactly what they want. They want Spanish hedonism. Dionysian hedonism that only the tourists and the travel agents get to see, because the reality here is that we’re always really pissed off, and really burnt, not just by the sun. The Russians want the hedonism we don’t get to enjoy, they want the prices we can’t afford, they want the siesta we can’t even take. And they want music, music all night long, Benidorm! Fiesta!”

The russians behind the scenes

I liked this. I can see she is a Bolano fan. I read a review that mentioned this book as having a fragmented nature, and it reminds me so much of those early Bolano books, like Skating Rink. Which had a similar feel of being told in little snippets at times. It also felt like a detective novel, but it never was, and this is the same. It is a crime novel but more about the hunt and the people Michela meets. It also has a feeling of being. Made to be filmed . So when I heard it had already been sold and was being made into a film, I wasn’t surprised it had that feel of a book that would work well. The range of characters would suit many British and other character actors .As we trawl the darker side of Benidorm. A place where dreams are made and broken like most Flash seaside towns, it has a darker side. Blackpool in the sun, as it is called, is a place where, just a few corners away from the front, you can be caught up in a darker world than you can imagine. Place full of lost souls, souls on the run. And broken dreams make the world of Beindorm Michela Mckay work through a darker place than many see on holiday. Do you have a favourite book set in a seaside town?

 

January 2025 A slow start to the year

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  1. Strait is the Gate by Andre Gide
  2. Eugenie Grandot By Honore de Balzac 
  3. Mozarts Journey to Prague by Eduard Mörike
  4. Night Flight by Antoine De Saint -Exupery
  5. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Nikolai Leskov
  6. The Doctor’s Wife by Sawako Ariyoshi 
  7. The Frolics ofThe Beasts by Yukio Mishima

I managed just seven reviews for the first month of the year. I start with a few French classics and then a book following Mozart. Then, the daring early avatars’ lives told. Then a woman goes on a killing spree. A doctor’s wife tells her life with an overbearing mother. Then a final Japanese novella that I didn’t really get on with. No New countries and no new publishers.

Book of the month

 

I loved this book about those early pilots flying over the Andes as the earliest commercial flight started taking off the ground. I have a couple other of his books on my tbr I hope to get to this month.

Non-Book moments

January is slow for new albums, and I haven’t brought any as of yet this year. I streamed the Newq Anne B savage album, which is the second I have the debut album. This album is good I loved the song Donegal as it is a place I have many happy thoughts about. On TV, Skelton Crew finished a little bit of an anti-climax in the end. Then I love a bit of cheesy crime TV, so the new series of the good ship murder has been fun, a silly holiday destination crime series. Chanel Fives’ take on Death in Paradise has a few twists. Then at the end of the month, Disney Plus had a new series High Potenial a sort of Female Monk a woman with a high IQ and unique way of viewing the world gets a job as a detective after solving a case whilst working as a cleaner at the police station.

Next Month

I think I will be slow for a while. I am still just in the middle of sorting my reading room, office, and library. This involves storing a lot of books as I need a clear out. Then, I will buy new bookcases and a new hi-fi unit with some shelves. I am not the quickest at this. I hope to have it all done by the end of February. I am also mixing some new books in I had dreamed of reading Classics all year, but I now know after a Month the reason I don’t read a lot of classics is maybe I was too caught up in the latest thing, but that said I still have several new books building up over the month I will be reading a few new books each month just keep on top of my subscriptions and prize list I brought the five translated books on the republic of consciousness US longlist that came out earlier this month. I am still a million overdoing the Booker International. I have shadowed for so many years, and I can’t think of not doing it.  I may do a piece when my library is done I am looking forward to it. Done, I don’t cope well with the Chaotic Room, and this room is the place I blog  from these days. I will be happier when it is all finished. What are your plans for next month?

Eugéine Grandet by Honoré de Balzac

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Eugéine Gandet by Honoré de Balzac

French fiction

Origninal title – Eugéine Grandet

Translator – Slyvia Raphael

Source – Personal copy

In my first book of the year, I covered a relationship between cousins, and this is my second book of 2025. Another French book has that in part of one of the storylines; this was rewritten by Blazac after he wrote the original version so it would fit in with his grand plan of Human comedy. This fits in part about rural life and is set in a small village in the Loire near the town where Balzac grew up as a young man. So, for me, some of the characters may have been based on people he knew in that village when he was growing up.

In certain provincial towns, there are houses whose appearance arouses a melancholy as great as that of the gloomiest cloisters, the most desolate moorland, or the saddest ruins.There is, perhaps, in these houses, a combination of the silence of the cloister, the desolation of moorlands and the sepulchral gloom of ruins. In them life is so still and uneventful that a stranger would think them uninhabited, if his eye did not suddenly meet the pale, cold look of a motionless figure whose almost monk-like face appears above the window-ledge at the sound of an unknown step. These melancholy characteristics are to be found in the appearance of a house in Saumur, at the end of the steep street which leads to the château through the upper part of the town. This street, not much used nowadays, is hot in summer, cold in winter, and dark in parts; it is noteworthy for the resonance of its little cobbled roadway, which is always clean and dry, for the narrowness of its winding path, and for the peace of its houses that are part of the old town and are dominated by the ramparts.Dwellings there, three hundred years old, though built of wood, are still sound, and their varied exteriors contribute to the unusual appearance which commends this part of Saumur to the attention of antiquaries and artist

The opening of the book

The book focuses on the Grandet Family, who in the small town of Saumur, have become very wealthy. Still, the head of the household, Felix, is almost a Scrooge-like figure, a man who has, over the years, built up wealth from his wife’s estate. To start with, he married her. She was the daughter of a timber owner. Over the years, Felix built up the funds the family hands. But as he has done this, he has become cut off from everyone around him. So yes, he has money, but he only allows six people into his home. He has a daughter, Eugenie. She has many men in the village who want to take her hand, but Felix makes the house live on only a few francs a week as he gets tenants to pay him with produce. Enter to this is the dashing Charles, a cousin from Paris. When Eugenie gives him some gold coins, Felix overreacts and locks her up and sets out to get money from Charles. Along the way, Felix is told that Eugenie should inherit his wife’s money if anything happens to her. She and Charles stay connected after Felix strips him of money. We see how she becomes a woman wanted to be married by many men when she finally has her money.

Only six of the townsfolk had the right of entry into Grandet’s house. Of the first three of these, the most important was Monsieur Cruchot’s nephew. Ever since he had been appointed president of the county court at Saumur, this young man had added the name of Bonfons to that of Cruchot and had been working hard to make Bonfons supersede Cruchot. He already signed himself

C. de Bonfons. If any litigant was ill-advised enough to call him Monsieur Cruchot, he soon became aware of his blunder in court. The magistrate favoured those who called him ‘Monsieur le Président’ but he bestowed his most generous smiles on the flatterers who said ‘Monsieur de Bonfons’. Monsieur le Président was thirty-three years old and owned the estate of Bonfons (Boni Fontis), which brought in an income of seven thousand livres a year.

How Felix makes the money from his wives estate

This is the story of a girl crushed by her father. She is generous and lovely, but she is crushed by Felix and his decisions over the years. Balzac captures the stifling nature of being trapped in a small village that happens to Eugenie and her mother before her. It is hard to avoid comparing this to Dickens. There is a feeling Felix is the Anit Scrooge in a way. He is a miser like Scrooge, but unlike Scrooge, we see what happens when someone so focused on control of his family’s wealth, But there is also a way he could be compared to Miss Havisham as he goes through life his world shrinks like Miss Havisham. Eugenie isn’t like any Dickens character. She is crushed by her father. The generous soul she is is at every turn blocked and tried to be broken by her father. But like Dickens, it is a long look at how wealth has now dropped from the landowners to the merchants and how greed can cause men to act a certain way. Felix could have come from a Dickens novel in a way. He has touched on Mr Murdstone (I’m just rereading David Copperfield for later this month ). Have you read this or any other books by Balzac that may have influenced Dickens as both saw how greed can influence people to act.

 

Living Things by Munir Hachemi

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Living Thing by Munir Hachemi

Spanish fiction

0riginal title – Cosas vivas

Translator – Julie Sanches

Source – personal copy

I have missed several fitzcarradlo books over the last few years. So I decided to cancel a subscription and try to get some of the books I missed from their backlist. This is another writer from one of those Granta lists. Munir was on the 2021 list of the best Spanish language writers. His story of vital signs was part of that collection. The first book of Spanish writers produced so many great writers like Rodrigo Hasbun, Pola Ooixarac and Andres Neumann, to name a few. There have been a couple from the second collection that came out. I reviewed another book by the writer Martin Felipe Castagnet. Munir Hachemi’s father is from Algeria. He studied Spanish and has a master’s degree in Spanish. This was his debut novel. It is part auto-fiction, part dialogue on industrial farming.

Sunday, 14 July

I read Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory from start to finish. An unexpected surprise. It’s a social novel where the main character – a guy – takes us through the ins and outs of the artistic field; there is no anecdote outside the field of cultural production (exactly!). The book was recommended by my ex-girlfriend Mónica, now a close friend. Her current boyfriend recommended it to her. I consider ringing her but don’t actually want to; besides, it’d be expensive and I’m not sure she’s read the book yet.

Instead I call Marta, my current girlfriend, and realize I don’t have a lot to share. I say things are all right; I have no idea if she can tell it isn’t true. My mission to obtain experience, as I referred to it, has been a failure. I have a new understanding of Piglia’s famous question: how to narrate the horror of real events?

We’re running out of food.

A mixof reading and the slow way the trip falls apart as the food goes and the still drink

The book follows what happens when four friends from university decide to head to France with the initial idea of joining the grape harvest.( I did something similar in Germany many years ago, working in a vineyard for a week. ) Munir, G, Ernesto and Alex head in a Suzuki Swift. Our Narrator, Munir, is full of ideas about being a writer. In the book’s first part, he describes how different writers describe being and how to start writing as they head for this summer of what they feel will be fun grape picking. But then, when they get there, they are told there isn’t any work in the vineyard to harvest grapes for four Spanish students. This shatters their plans, so they take what turns out to be a dark turn and find a chop in an industrial chicken factory where the four start to work and have their eyes open to the horrors of industrial-scale factory farming and the effect of this on the four of them. The co-workers’ menace and the place turn this from what would have been a fun summer working trip into something darker. As they drink, they become a little wild and don’t fit in on the family campsite they are living on, as the madness and horrific nature of the day job leads to wild nights. We see all this through Munir’s journal, but as he says earlier in the book, this is the writer; this is another Munir.

Today work has shown me the true nature of animal ex-ploitation. The site reminded me of the end of the world: a massive, modular, bleach-white industrial unit in the middle of a scorched wheat field. In the background the sun rose, wanting to drown the world in the blistering co-lours of dawn but finding everything in that narrow space to be yellow or white, and nothing else. Access to the complex was through a pavilion-like annexe. We got in a queue, and a veterinarian handed each of us a soft plastic suit that looked like a giant, shiny white potato sack, and a headpiece made of the same material with a see-through window for the eyes. Then he sprayed us with some sort of disinfectant hose. The scene reminded me of Holocaust documentaries, except we weren’t so much naked as overdressed. They informed us we wouldn’t be able to leave until our (lunch) break at eleven-thirty. At first I was alarmed because I had to pee, but it took me less than an hour to sweat every last drop of water from my body. Even though I bore it out, I’d go so far as to say it was unbearable.

The descripition of where they end up working in the factory farm.

This is only 114 pages, but as you see, it has a lot more to it. The writer discovers his voice in the book by describing the books he loves and the four having a wild summer. Part criticism of the other nature and brutality of factory farming and its effect on the four of them. As we follow Munir’s journal of the summer. This had echoes of Bolano in many ways. The description of writers he loved reminds me of the love of poetry and poets in the first part of Savage Detectives. But then it vias into environmental and green issues around factory farming and the horrors he sees he compares at time to the way we looked at the holocaust pictures. This is a powerful debut from a writer who seems to love playing with the nature of his writing and the genre he is writing. This has auto-fiction, thriller, Bolano-like prose, and green themes all thrown into a hard-hitting short novella. Have you read any of the writers from the second collection of Spanish writers from Granta?

Winston’s score is a B. It is a solid debut novella that is fast-paced and can be read in a few hours.

Ultramarine by Marietta Navarro

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Ultramarine by Marietta Navarro

 

French fiction

Original title – Ultramarins

Translator – Cory Stockwell

Source – review copy from translator

Now, I was sent a couple of proofs from Heloise, which was kind. I had been sent their first book, and I just never got around to reviewing it. So, I owe them a review or two. They are another publisher that champions female voices as they say on the website. Héloïse Press champions worldwide female talent. Héloïse’s careful selection of books gives voice to emerging and well-established female writers from home and abroad, with a focus on intimate, visceral and powerful narratives. This is the debut novel from French poet and playwright Mariette Navarro. She came up with the idea of the book after she went on a writer’s retreat that was two weeks on a cargo ship from France to the West Indies. Although she had seasickness, the book was inspired by the notes she took while on the ship.

THEY SLIP INTO THE WATER.

The tips of their toes and then their entire bodies: the sharp pain of the cold and the burning salt that seems to become more potent as it touches the skin. Ribcages compressed by the immense ocean, as though the enormous mass, grey in places, didn’t allow itself to be penetrated quite so easily – witness how, from the beginning of the voyage, the water has systematically closed back in upon itself behind the freighter that does everything in its power to cleave it. You can’t tear it like a piece of cloth; you don’t leave any imprint on it, as you would in sand or snow. By plunging into it, you condemn yourself to invisibility

There is something sexual as she watches them in the water

 

Ultramarine is a poetic book that follows a cargo ship on the journey she took from France across the Atlantic. The big difference she wants to make in her story is that the captain of the ship in the book is female. She is the only female on the ship, but she is respected and well-known, as her father was also a well-known captain on the same shipping line. But when she decides that as the sailors would all like a swim in the ocean a sort of  take on the Neptune festival when you cross the from the hemispheres so they are all lower in a lifeboat the twenty of them but did more come back, there is a point while they are swimming where they try to count the sailor and get 21? But after this piece of freedom, the boat has a weird feeling. The boat slows, and things are going strange. Her connection with the crew changed after that event.

She kept going along these lines, feeling her way for-ward, and for a few weeks that was enough to recreate a kind of link – tenuous, shifting – between her and this captain without a ship. Among her clearest visions was the face of death, which her father had clearly witnessed in a way no one living should see, and which explained his silences better than all the medical scans he was made to undergo.

She thought of that passage from the Odyssey that had made such a mark on her when she was small. Ulysses, lost at sea, arrives by chance in the kingdom of the dead, and proceeds to visit them. He meets sailors who have recently died, shipmates whose death he’d been unaware of, and finally, after a dramatic and tearful build-up, his mother. He’s the only person in the world to have ever been offered the chance to speak to his mother one last time. As for her father, perhaps he also found Ulysses’ secret pathway, but didn’t come all the way back, instead remaining there in this world between worlds where it matters little whether you walk in the rain

this is near the end but Mariette said she loved the Odysessy so this passage jumped out at me

This book has a poetic feel. The Beyond the Zero Podcast features an interview with both the writer and translator, which made me want to read the book. It explained that the seed of novella was from the two weeks she spent on the cargo ship. But the main part of the text is from her notes on the two weeks she spent on the boat. But she wondered what would happen if. The captain, instead of a man, was a woman, and if they had this event in the middle of the cruise, what would happen? The later part of the book has an eerie feel. At times, something isn’t quite right, but you can’t put your finger on it. She mentioned she is a fan of sea-based books from Odyssey to Moby Dick, even though the title is a nod to the deepest blue, a nod to the ocean, a title that was also used by Malcolm Lowry for a ship-based book. Also, there was a band called Ultramarine, best known for the United Kingdom album, which would fit well with this book. it is poetic and dreamy at times. The writer is working on a new novel that will be out later this year in France, and hopefully, we get another poetic slice from this writer. This is one of those books that hasn’t a lot but has such beauty in the writing and the translation. They talked about how some of the ship terms were hard to translate and how poetic Mariiette’s writing is? Have you read any of the books from Heloise Press yet?

Winstons score +A stunning poetic book about a captain and her crew after a swim

 

Weights and Measures by Joseph Roth

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Weights and Measures by Joesph Roth

Austrian fiction

Original title – Das falsche Gewicht 

Translator – David Le Vay

Source – Personal copy

I looked at the Goodreads list of books for 1937. I’m unsure if I missed this or if it wasn’t on the list of books for the year. I looked on my shelves to see if any writers I liked had missed the list, and I found this one. I am a fan of Joseph Roth, who is most well-known for The Radetzky March. In a way, all his books are around the Austro-Hungarian empire. Here is a perfect example of that: we follow a marriage falling apart, and in that, it seemed an ideal bookend to the last book I reviewed, The Start of a Marriage Going Wrong by another short lived writer. Because Roth, like Szerb, died in World War Two, he was a more problematic drinker and had just heard of the death of Ernst Toller when he died a few days later.

Once upon a time in the District of Zlotogrod there lived an Inspector of Weights and Measures whose name was Anselm Eibenschütz. His duty consisted of checking the weights and measures of the tradesmen in the entire district. So, at specified intervals, Eibenschütz went from shop to shop and investigated the yardsticks and the scales and the weights. He was accompanied by a sergeant of gendarmerie in full panoply. Thus the State made manifest its intention to use arms, if necessary, to punish cheats, in accordance with the commandment proclaimed in the Holy Scrip-tures, which considers a cheat to be the same as a thief…

The introduction to the weights and measure officer of the title in the first page.

The book follows an Artillery officer, Anselm Elbenshchutz. He has taken a job in a small town near the Russian border, working for the government as a weights and measures officer, checking that everyone is doing it right.. But what happens when this man, a gentleman and officer with his principles, tries to lay the line of the law in this place where all he sees is people bending the rules and those near him taking bribes. He makes enemies, but when his wife, who made him move, has an affair with one of his clerks and becomes pregnant, he is drawn to a beautiful, mysterious Gypsy, Euphemia. She lives with one of the men he has most upset, Jadlowker, a profiteer. He tries to make money here and there. And as his world falls apart, we see how a good man ends up in a border area as people escape Russia. His wife then gets Caught up in the cholera outbreak in the area and dies with the Baby she has conceived with Anselm’s clerk. We see the spirit of the man broken. A motif and character that Roth has done well in the other books I have read over the years by Roth.

Eibenschütz looked at her constantly. He tried to catch her eye at least once, but he did not succeed. Her eyes were wandering somewhere in the distance. God alone knew what she was thinking about!

They resumed their game and Eibenschütz won a number of hands. He was a little shamefaced as he pocketed the money. And still Euphemia sat at the table, a silent flower. She glowed and remained silent.

All around there was the usual noise, caused by the deserters.

They crouched on the floor and played cards and threw dice. As soon as they had gambled everything away they began to sing. As usual, they sang the song Ja lubyl tibia’, out of tune and with croaking voices.

The Russian deserters that come across the border to his area and the Gpysy girl he falls for

Anselm, as a person who took the weights and measures job, was what would have at one time in the UK been called a Jobsworth. He’d been on the TV show That’s Life as someone who followed the line of the law to the point. But what follows is what happens to be hidden closed doors, those little bribes that, if unchecked, like here, where he lives, grow over time and what, when he arrives, seems an easy job. It isn’t, and as his world falls apart, as I say, this is a character Robert wrote well the fallen man as a character wife having an affair enemies everywhere. A love that is with his enemies this is a man in freefall as we see all around him turn bad and his world falls apart. All this is a short novella, a lesser-known book by Roth. The place he evokes is like an Austrian Cornwall of those smugglers and people trying to make a living on the other side of the law. Borders often have this dark side, even if a few things are cheaper over the border or the world seems better over the border. Well this is my third book for club1937 and a book that isn’t as well known as his other books. Have you read Roth?

Winstons score –A solid little novella from one of the great Austrian writers

The Shining by Jon Fosse

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The Shining by Jon Fosse

Norweigan fiction

Original title – Kvitleik

Translator – Damion Searls

Source – Personal copy on kindle

Well, this is the first book after Fosse won the Nobel. I did a short post on the day he won the prize. I had reviewed three books from him before the Prize, the first of his septology, Aliss in the Fire and Scenes from a childhoood. I had read the other two parts of Septology and as I often do, hadn’t got to review them. As I said in my last post, my dreams of blogging more often fall short, but I am getting there, so this isn’t me moaning it is just a fact of life I read more than I can possibly ever review, but yes, this is my sixth book by Jon Fosse and to be truthful, I loved this it is a short book 48 pages in the paperback so in comparison to his other books this is actually probably the favourite I have read from him. Although at some point, I will go back and read septology in a single bite. Anyway, I was going to wait for this, and then I listened to the Mookse and the Gripes podcast with the translator about Jon Fosse, and I just had to get it so for quickness, I got it on the Kindle as it is about the length I can read on kindle.

What am I talking about, I thought. There’s the forest in front of me, it’s just a forest, I thought. All right then, this sudden urge to drive off somewhere had brought me to a for-est. And there was another way of talking, according to which something, something or an-other, led, whatever that might mean, to something else, yes, something else. I peered into the forest in front of me. Forest. Yes.Trees right next to one another, pines, pine trees.

He questions his action heading down the path

The book is in the mind of a man who has, for some reason, headed down a forest track, turning off the main road. He is in his car, and then he gets stuck on the path. As he does, he thinks about the points he could have turned back. Then he initially stays in the car warm and just waits for someone to come. Then he decides to head into the forest it is turning to night but he feels to drawn into the forest. He then starts to see a glow in the distance. What is it as he is drawn to the light, the light seems to come closer and closer. But what are these lights?He seems drawn to the lights and maybe is in a moment of his life is he alive, or is this his soul drifting you are never quite sure if this is real or imagined. Then it moves on when he reaches the lights, but that would spoil a 48-page book to say more it is wonderfully evocative.

No reason at all. And so why did I drive onto the forest road then. It was purely by accident, maybe. Pure chance.Yes,you probably couldn’t call it anything else.

But chance, what’s that anyway.No, I can’t start in with that kind of silly thinking. It never goes anywhere. And what I have to do now is get my car free, yes, just that. And then I have to try to turn it around. But that.Yes it’s because I didn’t pass anywhere I could turn the car around, if I had then of course I would’ve turned around, a long time ago, because the forest road is pretty much the most boring road to drive on that you can imagine.

He is maybe in a altered state I wondered at times or has something alse happened to him ?

I loved the short nature of this after the septology it is like a  palate cleanser in a meal, it is full of Fosse but intense and just a mouthful of him. I love the otherworldly ness of the lights, and the events after the lights appear in the forest. The forest has long been a place for things happening but also the mind to wander from the tropical Jungle of Wilson Harris and the way spirits and the forest can talk to you. Through things like Twin Peaks which is what I thought of her I had to wonder if a log lady would turnup there is also a sense of the spiritual of been between worlds what has happened to draw him down the forest road and why did the car break down? Why wander off these are all questions unanswered about our narrators actions. Have you read this the first of his books to come out after his Nobel win this year.

Winstons score – A an Espresso shot of Fosse

Autumn Quail by Naguib Mahfouz

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Autumn Quail by Naguib Mahfouz

Egyptian literature

Original title –  السمان والخريف

Translator – Roger Allen and revised by John Rodenbeck

Source – personal copy

When I looked at the list of books that came out in 1962, I did a deep dive and this is one that caught my eye as I’ve had the Cario trilogy sitting on my shelves for years, and I have reviewed another book by the Nobel winning Mahfouz a few years ago for the 1077 club. It also reminds me I have the Cario trilogy sitting there to read at some point. Mahfouz was the voice of his nation he wrote about the changes in his country over the 20th century. He rarely talks about his private life, marrying late in middle age, and he rarely travelled this book harks back to the Nasser regime and to 1952 written ten years after that. Even the main character in the book, ISA is an early casualty of the new regime.

But what was going on in Cairo?

There was no car to take him anywhere. In the station square, people were walking in every direction, anger on their faces, heaping curses on the British. It was cold. The sky was hidden by ominous clouds; the wind was still and lifeless. Shops were closed as if for mourning, and thick smoke rose along on the skyline.

What was going on in Cairo?

Cautiously, he began to walk, then beckoned to a man coming toward him. “What’s going on in town?” he asked.

“The last day’s come,” was the bewildered reply.

“What do you mean? Protest demonstrations?”

“Fire and destruction,” the man yelled, moving on.

From the seonc pages as Nasser moves in on Cario

 

 

Isa was a civil servant in the old regime, and he was climbing the ladder, but how was he doing that? before Nasser took over from the monarchy in Egypt. The book opens as Cario is burning as Nasser sweeps to power  He is, as he says many times in the book he is caught between the two, looking back but knowing things had to change but not wanting to be part of that. So he loses his job as he likes to take bribes and is wiped out by the change in regime. He refuses to tow the new line and is, in a way, an outcast. Alongside this, he is losing his fiance Salwa to his cousin Hasan a man who is part of the new Nasser regime. This is also like by her family as they’d p[refer her to Marry the Man on the Rise. He marries a woman who is unable to give him a child, but they have money, and this means he can live in the past in a way that he then meets and sleeps with a prostitute and gets her pregnant. This is a busy work

Hasan Ali ad-Dabbagh came in beaming. Of medium height, well built, with a square face and deep-lined features, he had a broad chin, and his clear intelligent eyes and sharp-pointed nose were very distinctive. He kissed his aunt’s hand, shook Isa’s warmly without managing to lessen the latter’s feelings of annoyance, then sat down beside him and asked for some tea. He was almost the same age as Isa but was still in the fifth grade, whereas politics had managed to push Isa up to the second. Though he had a bachelor’s degree in com-merce, the only work he’d been able to find was with the draft board.

“How are you?” Isa’s mother asked.

“I’m fine,” Hasan replied, “and my mother and sister are well too.”

Hssan maybe he embodies the new ideals ?

I feel this is a book that is maybe the exception to what we say about books. It could have been 100 pages longer. There is so much crammed in the story of Isa, but there is also so much chatting and commentary of the events of that time and how it affected people like Isa when Nasser swept to power. There is a sense of Mahfouz wanting to say so much about those years that followed and that maybe makes the later part of the book seem to drift the plot and drive we see early on as the violence sweeps Cario has died down and the book maybe tries to do to much in a short space if that makes sense. I loved the first third of this book. It really works, but then he seems to get distracted by talking about what happened rather than mixing it up with the plot. He is best when the plot and what is being said move; the later part of this felt like him unloading his feelings in the characters. But This is one of three books he wrote about those years I must try The Others at some point. Have you read Mahfouz? This is the first of my Club1962 choices

Winston’s score – is B great start, but the later section of the book is just too much about talking about what happened in a way.

The Living and the rest by José Eduardo Agualusa

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The living and the rest by José Eduardo Agualusa

Angolan fiction

Original title –Os Vivos e os Outros

Translator – Daniel Hahn

Source – Review copy

I decided as the last Czech book for Czech Lit Month was a piece of magic realism, it would be fun to have another very different piece of Magic realism from Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualasa, a writer I have featured twice before on the blog and a writer I love to read he has such a rich imagination and this book sabout a group of writers that end up getting cut off on an island after a storm just appealed and as. The last book had an island in it. The two seemed good to review together. Agualasa has been on the Booker international list, so that was another reason I wanted to read this as he is a writer who could end up again on the list, and I am sure he must be near the top of some Nobel lists; it wouldn’t be a shock to me for him to win in the next decade.

-My character, Jude, is a brutally self-centred guy, narcis. sistic, machista, and misogynist.”
“You aren’t afraid readers will mix the two of you up?”
“You think I’m a jerk?”
Daniel laughs nervously.
“The narrator of this book has your name, he’s a writer.”
“I like exploring the possibility of being someone else, someone unlike me, while still being myself. I like confusing
readers, too.”
The conversation continues. Jude talks about the new wave of African writers, who are more concerned with being writers than with seeming African. He talks about cosmopolitanism, localism and identity. Finally Daniel asks the audience if they have any questions. One girl raises her hand.

I agree with new African writers changiong how we view lit from Africa

As I said, the book follows seven days after a cyclone hits an island on the eve of its first Literary festival and the group of writers that had arrived early are cut off, not knowing what has happened to the mainland and unable to contact the outside world this is the framing device but what follows isn’t so much as the survival story but how a group of writers let their imaginations go wild. Even though they all seem to be African writers that had got their early from Angola, Mozambique and Nigeria there is a feeling that you may know some of these writers they are well-known writers not quite painted enough you can say oh that is Okri or so on but yes you feel as thou they are writers you have read well I do and the in-jokes about how African lit is viewed in the rest of the world ( I often feel guilty of this I must try and separate out writing as every country has a style of its own etc etc you know I am planning in the last few months of this year to add a few more titles from Africa) anyway there is a sense of them knowing each other a sense of being in the circuit together at book fairs, festival etc. But as they days go on some of them see the lines between reality and dreams and the works blurring as they days go by Have they lived or are they in limbo what happens when a group of imaginative writers is cut off and have no sense of the outside world around them? well, you find out here

.Jude smiles, amused at her distress. He tells her he spent years wearing shoes with platform soles. He had them custom-made, at an old cobbler’s in Lagos, who managed very skilfully to disguise their height. Whenever conference organisers asked him if he preferred to speak standing up, at a lectern, or sitting down, he always went for the second option. He also preferred being photographed sitting down. It took him years to get over his complex.
“You’re really not as short as all that,” says Luzia. “I’m serious

This made me smile just as I thought of a famous actor very small that has shoes that make him taller.

This is the second book in recent years that has used a literary festival as a framing device for the story, but they go in different ways after that the other was Pola Olioixarac Mona. But this has more in common with a book like Lord of the flies except this is what happens when a bunch of writers with great imaginations are cut off and left to live without the everyday essential of internet phones contact with the outside world what happens when the mind drifts between the real and the uin=real between life and death what happened after the storm. This is a book that blurs those lines I was reminded of some of Antonio Lobo Antunes’s book The return of the Carvals that saw the orignal the great figures of Portugeese exploration reappear in Lisbon. But here we see the myths and legions of these writers growing over the day. An clever piece of magic realism that shows the power of the imaginagtion and how we can sometimes forget we are alive when there is. no one to tell you have survived something. Have you read this book ?

Winstons score – B soild book from a great writer I think it may have a chance of the booker longlist

A Sunday in Ville- d’Avary by Dominique Barberis

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A sunday in Ville-d-Avray by Dominique Barberis

French fiction

Original title – Un Dimanche á Vile-d’Avray

Translator – John Cullen

Sources -Personal copy

This book is another holiday buy, but this time it was last year’s trip to Northumberland I brought this book. I think I may have seen Jacqui mention it 9feels like a book she would love to me ). So I got it. I have seen several excellent books in translation in the last couple of years from Daunt books. Dominique Barberis was born in Cameroon as her father was a diplomat. She studied at the Sorbonne, then went on to teach, had a job in insurance and then became a professor of foreign languages. She has published several Literary studies books as well as eight novels. This was her latest novel and focused on the relationship between two sisters.

I believe my sister stayed under the spell of that literary love affair for a long time, while I, younger but clearly more practical-minded, developed a crush on my first-year Latin teacher, Monsieur Jumeau (Bernard Jumeau). My grades climbed up to the heights. I knew my declensions by heart. I worked hard to dazzle him. Things went so far that predictions for my future employment shifted from cashier to Latinist or archivist-palaeographer – which had been Monsieur lumeau’s first vocation and fondest dream; he told us about it in the course of a gathering in the faculty room. Blushing and modest, I stood between my parents the whole time. I was twelve.He suggested the same future for me, a suggestion I took as a declaration of reciprocal love and a discreet way of making our engagement official.

Her sister feel in loove with books when they were younger.

The book is about two sisters who, as kids, were close, but as often happens when we grow, the distance comes between us, and time flies, so we meet Jane. She tells us about her other half, Luc, and how he hates going to the sister who is married to a doctor, and they live in Ville-d -avary one of these posh commuter towns on the very edge of Pasris as she says it seems hard to get there, but it isn’t it is just fact the two sisters now live in different worlds than they once did. So when Jane heads out one Sunday to meet her sister, Claire Marie, she hasn’t; let her know she is turning up as she feels her sister knows how to press her buttons. (doesn’t every sibling know this !!) So when they talk, and an odd comment about Jane is happy in her life leaves her wondering and then she finds out about a connection her sister has made to a mysterious man she has just told her about many years earlier that offered her a lift one day. Marc Herman, he is a man of mystery and the two connect, and she meets him again and again. But also, the area is seeing things happen at the same time odd men hanging around, crime. Added to this her sister as a child was obsessed with Rochester from Jane Eyre as a child for a really long time. Who is Marc? He said he knew her from her husband, but does he?

Then may I drop you off?

They went back to his car, chatting as they walked, and after a detour found themselves pleasantly strolling the streets in the vicinity of the Chaville train station.’Let’s just say goodbye here,’ my sister said, all of a sudden. ‘It’s much simpler. You needn’t trouble yourself. It’s late, and mine is the very next stop. I’ll take the train.’

But Marc Hermann didn’t look like a man in a hurry. He protested: ‘But why? Don’t go yet.’ She stayed. She wondered how she’d be able to get away from him. Would she have to thrust out her hand?

When she meet the mystreious Marc Hreman he is almost a Modiano character

This is a book that captures that commuter life well but also how it can have a dark underbelly and that shimmering tension that there can be between sisters. I was reminded of Simenon or Modiano, both of which do tension. Both also show that often there is darkness and other things just under the surface no matter how perfect the streets are, and this is that sort of town perfection but with a little crack little piece of darkness and this shows a little of them but also the sibling connection it is a modern sibling story were sisters are more distant than they used to be. Desire and jealousy are here just below the surface, also lost loves. Have you read any of the recent books from Daunt books which one shall I try next?

Winston’s score – B – just below the surfaces simmer a lot between the sisters but also where she lives

 

The remains by Margo Glantz

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The remains by Margo Glantz

Mexican fiction

Original title – EL rastro

Translator – Ellen Jones

Source – Personal copy

I brought this in my recent trip to Fife I have been a huge fan of Church Press which seems to get its as readers the cream of  Latin American literature. SO I always look for them when I am in a shop I know will have some books from them Like Toppings in Saint Andrews does. I brought it forward fro this month as it was on my trolley with all the possible books for this month. I had seen a review mention Sebald and Ducks Newberryport, both books I loved, and also the mention of Glenn Gould, of course, made me think of Thomas Bernhard. Now Margo Glantz is a perfect fit for Church Press given what they had done for Claudia Pinerio. Glantz is in her nineties and has had a couple of books translated into English yet is huge in Mexico and Spain but she has never really set the English-speaking world on FIRE. I WAIT THE DAY A Lesser known writer in English wins the Nobel like MODIANO ( I struggled to get anything before his win I did and reviewed it|) Glantz maybe isn’t up in the Nobel ranks I don’t know enough to know if she would be any way I was captivated to read a book from a writer virtually unknown in English.

My name is Nora Garcia.It’s been years since I last came to the village: I park my car, then go shyly, warily, up to the front door and into the house. I barely recognise it, it’s changed, and not for the better, the garden’s overgrown, the plants are dry, the grass is yellowing, there are patches of bare earth where before there were flowering shrubs. Down in the ravine – flame trees, trees with wide canopies. The place is full and I almost lose my nerve, my heart shrinking: there are a few people I know, no one I’m especially fond of, and perhaps others I’ve forgotten: it’s been a long time.

The opening as she returns to nhis childhood village

The book has a stream-of-consciousness style. We follow a widow at a wake a celebration of his life for her Husband. Juan, he was a pianist-composer and a bit of a lad. The narrative follows his wife, Nora, as she talks to those that knew him and she drifts between the present and their long life together as in Proust moments that send her back to little snippets of her and Juans life. She is back there in her and Juan’s life. From the mildew smell around his coffin that reminds her of him. To talk to his friends about remembering him.The interactions they all had, the music they all lovcd etc. Then there are mentions of Glenn Gould with a classical pianist. It is hard to not mention him and how he played discussions around his performances and records. His heart surgery mixes as the friends and people they knew to remember Juan and her relationships.

I’m murmuring to myself (like Glenn Gould while he recorded the Goldberg Variations in the CBC studios), I cannot, cannot shake off that flowery scent, but mainly the smell of mildew: it surrounds me like a halo, like the halos around the heads of saints in paintings and statues.

I’ve listened to so much music the last few days, these terrible last days of the year, and I’ve cried so many painful, bitter tears, (black tears),I’ve cried so much while listening to music that I can’t listen any more, I can’t bearit, I’m full to the brim with it

Music can touch and make us rememebr a moment a look , a touch , a feeling !

 

This book is about grief but also about what we remember when that person is gone. Those Proustian things smell a tune, a place are the hooks we hang memories on. This is our closet of life the many coats a person wears over their lives together. This is a book that remembers a loved one. I love the bit that mentions Thomas Bernhard’s book about Glenn Gould, which they didn’t really get on with i, I loved that book, but as a musician, I could see why. This is about the essence of a person I think back on a book like Edouard Leve’s books that were about what made him at its heart, the art and likes. This is a book about what makes us look back. Another book I was reminded of was Naja Marie Aidt’s book about her son’s sudden death, which also looked at how we deal with Greif I loved this book it was an afternoon in Nora’s life but a lifetime in her and Juan’s world. Have you read this book?

Winston’s score – A – This is a writer I’d love to read more from!

 

July 23 The month that was !!

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  1. Karios by Jenny Erpenbeck
  2. The Dear Ones by Berta Dávila 
  3. Ada’s realm by Sharon Dodua Otoo
  4. Riambel by Priya Hein
  5. Fox8 by George Saunders 
  6. Heartland by Wilson Harris 
  7. Impossible by Erri De Luca 
  8. Pharricide by Vincent De Swarte 
  9. Tranquility by Attila Bartis 

I reviewed 9 books this month, given that we had spent 6 days in Scotland helping my dad sort my late aunt’s house and her funeral, and a week later, we went up again to bring her car, which she had wanted me to have. To get nine books reviewed was good any way my journey started with a relationship in old east Germany looked at again then we had a powerful tale of a mother and a decision she makes. Then a novel about race, gender and place with women all called Ada through the centuries. Then a young girl growing up in the slums of Madagascar looks at the rich folk and her life, and a mix of food history in the form of recipes is a potent mix. Then a fox shows us his home that is now a Mawl, as he calls the Mall they built there!. Then a man goes mad in the Guyana heartland as several ghosts appear from the jungle. Then a cat-and-mouse interview of death in the mountains unfolds in front of us. Then madness again with a man going mad in a lighthouse, and finally we have a man looking back after his mother’s funeral at how she controlled his life really in a book that has a slice of Bernhard chucked in it. We visited 8 countries this month and had a couple of new publishers on the reviews to the Blog. I also added Guyana to the blog. A very successful month which will make it hard to choose a book of the month this month.

Book of the month

I choose Wilson Harris’s book as it is maybe the most experimental book I read this month from a writer that should be better known than he is and someone I will be reading again soon. It was hard as this month there wasn’t a single bad book, infact, any book could have been a book of the month.

Non book events-

Firstly we were drawn into the four-part BBC drama The sixth commandment that followed the murder of Peter Farquhar by an ex-student a compelling drama of a man that was motivated by greed to kill older people well acted drama. Then I caught the  Dylan Biopic” I’m Not There” which I have on DVD but it was on Mubi so I watched it again I loved the album that came with this film I like how they used each actor to reflect a different side of Bob over the years is a clever touch for a singer that has had many faces over the decades. Still, with Music, I got one reissue on vinyl the Suede debut which had a parallel with My Aunt passing as many years ago on a visit to her house I brought the debut single from Suede in a shop in Kirkcaldy in May 1992 many years ago so to listen to the Debut brought memories of that holiday and time spent with her. The other release was Blur’s new album which has a melancholy  to it and echoes their earlier works with being completely new in itself

Next month –

Well, it is Woman in Translation month, and I am planning for every book next month to be from a female writer I have an ambitious idea, but as I tend to fail when I pin my flag to the pole, I wait to see how far I get with my plan for the month. before I mention too much. Anyway, there will be a number of female writers reviewed next month. What are your plans for next Month ?

The Dear ones by Berta Dávila

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The Dear ones by Berta Dávila

Galician fiction

Original title -Os seres queridos

Translator – Jacob Rogers

Source – Review copy

I have been championing the three times rebel [ress since they started bring books out they have a great ethos of working-class female voices in the minority languages. This time we stay in Spain but move to Galicia To a novelist and poet that is regarded as one of the leading voices of Galician literature, having won prizes both for her poetry and fiction. This novel won the Xerais Novel Award. She is also a well-known editorShe directs the independent publishing house Rodolfo e Priscila and is the director of the Rúa do Lagarto collection. This is the first book to be translated into English from her.

The book was about a mother who loses her son in a traffic accident. She was a radio show host for a local station and lived alone. A few months after the accident, still grieving, she moved in with her grandmother, an elderly woman who had some sort of dementia and wasn’t very mobile but was the only family the mother had left. Lucia asks if the grandmother resembles my grandmother Maria. I say probably, I’m sure she does, and detail some of my grandmother’s behaviours over the past few months. For example, she almost always recognises me the moment I come into the room, but often forgets recent news or what year it is; she asks me about grades and exams, as if I’m still an under-graduate, or about the father of my son, as if Miguel and I had never split up.

The book she was writing about a mother losing a son

This is a hard book to grasp as the events in the book seem so odd, but then again, life is odd and this is one bone journey I feel there will be many more women like our narrator here that have the feeling and guilt and trauma she has after birth and in motherhood. The book is about when is a mother ready to be a mother? What happens when your role as a mother doesn’t fit you? That is the heart of this story a woman struggling with that exact dilemma as she struggles to connect with her son so she tries to write a novel about losing a son at five years old. She had seen motherhood as something else, but the depression she has felt since the birth of her son, and the loss of self that comes with that is hard to deal with for her. So what will she do when she falls pregnant for a second time? How will she react, and how will the world around her react as she decides she may take a decision that will shock people near her. But she proves she still has choices to make around her life and her body. This is a hard-hitting story of one woman’s journey into motherhood and what happens when you maybe opt out of the role of being a mother.

THE BOY WAKES UP EARLY, CONTENTEDLY, ON THE FIRST DAY of winter and asks me how long it is until the school Christmas play and the day he can finally open up the presents under the tree. I tell him there won’t be a tree at Grandma Mara’s house-at most there’ll be a porcelain Baby Jesus shrouded by a wreath-and that it’s only four more sleeps. He’s a bit disappointed about the tree, but I try to convince him it will be a festive day: we’ll see my parents and my uncles, we’ll sing songs, and he’ll be able to help my sister prepare the tray of desserts and sweets. The boy asked for a stuffed doll, a picture book with two bears that are friends, and a bike. He repeats his list of presents and counts off on his fingers the nights he has to wait for them.

There is a coldness in this description of her son

 

This has a feel of auto fiction in its town I was reminded of how well Anne Ernaux speaks around her world with a flourish or over-elaboration at times, and this is the same it hasn’t to much luggage to the story it is narrative of her journey told as that no sidetrack or detours and it is so much more potent for that case as it shows how mental illness a post-birth can ravage that connection between mother and child but also what might happen after that when you have to face going through pregnancy again. It is a candid insight into post-natal depression but also how, even after that, women can still be strong and stand up. I am a big fan of three times rebel as they bring us voices that may have gone under the radar otherwise. This is a hard-hitting book for the reader, Have you read any books that deal with post-natal depression and Motherhood?

Winston’s score – +A Sparsh, stunning prose of one woman’s journey